Online Marketing

Device Deluge Leads to Always-Connected—But Elusive—Customers

Stephanie Jordan — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 01:30:55 +0000

There is a real risk for marketers to “lose” customers in our current age of the always-connected customer. This seems at first counter to the thought that more online time would mean more opportunities to engage the customer. It is true that more devices and more channels mean audiences are available in more places, at more times, however, it also means audiences’ scattered attention has made previously reliable customers increasingly elusive.

“New analytics solutions, multi-channel metrics, and better collaboration tools will be crucial in 2013,” says Aphrodite Brinsmead, senior analyst at Ovum. The Ovum analyst says organizations will feel the pressure to understand and pre-empt the needs from the always-connected customer. “Vendors will need to step up and add these capabilities fast, or else risk losing business,” believes Brinsmead. As part of its 2013 Trends to Watch series, Ovum explores the important changes in the customer experience and interaction market, detailing how technologies are evolving to meet new consumer demands and providing recommendations.

This always-connected trend is echoed by Forester Research, Inc. during a recent Webinar that looked at the challenges of reaching what it terms as the “always addressable” customer.

In the presentation by Darika Ahrens, interactive marketing analyst for Forrester, she notes that in 2010, there were so few “always on” customers that Forrester did not even collect data on them. “But by 2011,” says Ahrens, “we started to see this group emerging and they were already at 38 percent of the U.S. adult population. Recent research indicates that by the end of 2012, we believe the always on customer will constitute 42 percent of adults in the U.S.” She feels this is not a niche audience, given the rapid growth to date, and expected growth in the future.

What does this mean to marketers? While a marketer might think this means that more customers are more accessible via more devices throughout the day, Ahrens observes a real problem with this group. “Despite their connectivity, always addressable customers are harder to reach” Why? Because traditional marketing is starting to be tuned out and people are opting for subscriptions with ad-free environments. This group also expects higher relevancy than other groups. Because they are so connected, people expect what they see and hear to be relevant to them and if it is not; they are not willing to trade information. In a nutshell, there are more digital opportunities today to market to, but with those opportunities comes challenges.

One of the best takeaways from the Webinar is Ahrens’ recommendation to stop thinking about social media and think instead about the person a marketer is trying to reach and ask: “Who am I engaging with directly? What is their history with my brand and who else are they connected to?”

Ahrens says marketers need to understand when, where and why customers are engaging with a company by asking—where is this person when they engage with me? When can they come into contact with my brand and what, specifically, are they doing at that time?

Even though we have a deluge of devices today, (60 million people will have tablets alone by the end of 2012) and that customers have never been so connected as they are today, we still need to step away from the technology and focus on the person to understand what needs the customer has that you can fulfill. Ahrens recommends that marketers ask, “What need is revealed when I consider the people and their context together? What value or service can I offer that will fill that need? What messages or context must I create to delver that value or service?

Only after those questions and lots of research about the customer is done, should then technology be considered, even in this environment today where technology is so pervasive.

“One of the reasons we always put technology last is because it can be a false economy to think about a technology first or a platform first,” explains Ahrens. “At Forrester, we think it is about identifying the person first and from there your strategy flows so that by the time you get to the technology step and deciding what you are going to be using—the mobile devices, the tablets, or web TV or interactions with your digital campaign—it comes together as a final step.”

This reminder is important for marketers that can easily become overwhelmed with the number of channel options available today to reach out to customers. Having the technology be the final consideration puts the customer first. After all, isn’t that where a customer belongs in an organization of any size?

Email Marketers React to Shift From Hotmail to Outlook.com

Stephanie Jordan — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 03:16:48 +0000

About a month into the switch by Microsoft that replaced its flagship (but reputation-tarnished) mail service Hotmail with Outlook.com, email marketers are still sorting out what the ensuing email address changes mean to them. At the time of launch, Microsoft gave its users the option to choose a new Outlook.com email addresses or (for now anyway) keep Hotmail ones. Within an hour Microsoft said it had accumulated 1 million new Outlook.com users.

A few industry experts offered thoughts on the impact the switch might have to email marketers:

“The consequences for email marketers are not entirely known right now. However, as people switch to Outlook.com, and perceptions of owning a Hotmail.com domain seem old fashioned, marketers will see their Hotmail.com numbers dwindle, and more people changing their addresses. If it is currently not easy to change one’s email address in your preference center, and Hotmail.com comprises a large percentage of your database, it may be wise to revisit that decision.”
—Tom Sather, senior director, Email Research for ReturnPath

“As we see users migrate from Hotmail to Outlook.com, email marketers will probably witness a drop in their open rates from large segments of their Hotmail customer group. In Outlook.com, you quickly learn that from one outlook.com email address you can have many alias addresses. I recommend that email marketers keep an eye on their lists and check the relative levels of engagement from pre-existing Hotmail users.

“Email marketers should also keep an eye out for those new subscribers using Outlook.com. Be aware, these are brand new inboxes so relationship marketers will have highly visible emails—in a less crowded inbox.”
—Andrew Bonar, deliverability director for Emailvision

“As we look at how the new Outlook.com may impact marketers, the folder and sweep features stand out. Outlook.com detects and labels emails as promotional and newsletters, for example, offering an unsubscribe button that allows users to unsubscribe and filter all future advertisements from a company. It also creates “quick view” folders for certain messages and a “sweep” feature that lets users automatically move all messages from certain email addresses to a folder, as well as delete them on a schedule set by the user. These features—especially the scheduled cleanup—could really hurt email marketers who aren’t adequately engaging with their subscribers.”
—Mitch Lapides, president of FulcrumTech

Source: Fresh Address

Email Holding Its Own Against Social Media for Marketers

Stephanie Jordan — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 02:35:56 +0000

With the recent broadening of messaging channels (social media, collaboration, text, etc.) it might be easy to believe the oft-made claim that “email is dead,” but a number of marketers said this month that email beats social media when you look at the stats.

While all believe social media has an important role, none think email is losing its place as the cornerstone of emarketing efforts. Message Systems, a provider of messaging technology solutions, conducted a survey during its annual user conference this month and found that 97 percent of respondents leverage email for marketing campaigns. The survey also found social media rising in popularity, with 70 percent of respondents indicating that they market through social networks. But regardless of its popularity, social media is outperformed by email marketing when it comes to driving sales and delivering return on investment (ROI).

“Despite recent reports that the return on investment with email marketing has been declining over the past few years, our survey found that email is thriving, and driving more revenue and conversions than any other channel,” observes George Schlossnagle, CEO of Message Systems. “In fact, nearly 70 percent of our customers reported that their email marketing returns have actually trended upwards in the past five years.”

The findings of Message System’s survey were echoed in Monetate’s E-commerce Quarterly Report published mid-month. This report claims that when it comes to ecommerce, email still rules.

The report authors said, “Although social media is referring traffic to online shopping sites 77 percent more than last year, few users actually buy anything. E-commerce sites may be rushing to fill the Internet with their social banter and engagement, but the real winners are those emails campaigns reminding us of sales, previewing new items, and offering free shipping. At a rate of 4.25 percent, email deals are converting people to sales eight times better than social and four times (4x) that of search.”

Experian CheetahMail published its Q2 email trends report this week also shows email to be a solid marketers channel.

“For Q2 2012, overall email volume increased 10 percent while open rates were slightly above the 2011 Q2 rates, as more than 55 percent of brands had statistically significant increases in open rates for Q2 2012,” summarizes Regina Gray, vice president of strategic services for Experian CheetahMail. “While click rates continued to show a year-over-year decline, there is some evidence that the rates are stabilizing. Email is still the most effective channel to connect with customers as we’ve seen a growing trend of brands utilizing social capabilities to acquire and engage consumers and fans across these new media channels.”

Social clearly does have a place, however. According to the Message System benchmark survey, “Social marketing is growing, especially for engaging customers. Although most customers prefer to be contacted via email, marketers are increasingly using social media to engage with customers and interact in a two-way dialogue—64 percent of respondents said they added social media in the past year to obtain greater engagement.”

Overall, nearly half—47 percent—of all survey respondents disclosed that their companies have adopted social media (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter specifically) as a channel for two-way customer dialogue, trailing only phone and email.

The email trends discussed by these vendors seem to fly in the face of an earlier study conducted by the Direct Marketing Association that found that email marketing had dropped by 25 percent and was likely to continue to decline.

Social Data Plays Key Role in CMO Decisions, Predictions and Forecasts

Stephanie Jordan — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 01:50:09 +0000

As social media matures, marketers have been working to figure out how to harness the channel for financial gain and data gathering. Online marketers know that social media is a great way to engage customers and that it plays an important role in customer insight. An interesting January comment from research analysts at Gartner goes something like: “By 2017 the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) will spend more on IT Than the Chief Information Officer.” Given that so much of today’s marketing takes place through online channels, this comment seems entirely believable as IT is increasingly called upon to help not only with things like implementations, systems management, uptime, and compliance, but also with data management, collection, and analysis.

Bazaarvoice, whose social software helps big name clients like Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Macy’s, P&G, Panasonic, QVC, and USAA, and The CMO Club recently conducted a survey of The CMO Club members to ascertain how marketing executives are using social data across their organizations.

The survey, which includes all sizes of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations, found that almost half of CMOs use social data to make predictions or forecasts, and nearly nine in 10 say this data has influenced their decisions. CMOs also report driving this data beyond marketing, sharing data with other C-level executives (97.3 percent) and with functions, including sales (36.8 percent) and product management and development (35.1 percent).

Social data performs important functions. Nearly all CMOs (89.4 percent) say social data has impacted at least some of their decisions. This includes 21.3 percent of CMOs who say social data affects at least one in every five decisions they make. Social data can also hint at future consumer sentiment and campaign success. Because of this, nearly half (47.3 percent) of all CMOs have used social data to make predictions or forecasts, most commonly to project sales.

Social data is also driving smarter decisions beyond marketing, say The CMO Club members. While marketing teams and agencies most often extract the data, insights from it are used in product development, customer experience, and sales. Social data is also fueling C-level discussions. Almost all CMOs (97.3 percent) say they share findings from social data with other C-level executives at least annually, and most (67 percent) report to the C-level on social insights at least monthly.

In general, CMOs think social data reveals consumer sentiment and can improve brand awareness. Most CMOs (83.3 percent) believe social data is at least somewhat effective in indicating discernible trends or patterns that may impact the business. And 77.9 percent find social data at least somewhat effective in analyzing the influence of individuals or groups. The information is being used to identify consumer traits and patterns that impact brand loyalty and awareness.

“Nearly all CMOs now use social data to drive decisions,” states Erin Mulligan Nelson, CMO, Bazaarvoice. “As the business world re-centers around serving and delighting consumers, social data is turning CMOs into customer champions and heroes within the C-suite. As an industry, we have just started to tap into the potential of social data.”

Don't Pitch on Social Media

Stephanie Jordan — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 17:07:29 +0000

For small and medium-sized businesses, social media can really extend the reach of the company as a low-cost tool for connecting to the world and has firmly established its place among other online and traditional ways of marketing a business. When it comes time to do a product or service launch, the temptation might be to use social media to pitch story ideas to gain additional coverage and get noticed, but according to a recent poll of public relations professionals, businesses should think twice about using social media to pitch story ideas to promote company activities.

More than 80 percent of the PR pros said they primarily use social media to develop relationships with media and influencers, build trust and maintain transparency, share current news, or solicit feedback on products and services.

Only 13 percent of those polled use social media to proactively pitch story ideas to journalists and bloggers. The preferred method for pitching is still email. Press releases and story ideas being sent to the media via this traditional medium is expected to continue into the near future, as more than 90 percent of the PR folks plan to distribute the same or greater number of news releases via email in the coming year.

If you want to connect with media on social networks and build relationships, where should your concentration lie? The survey participants recommend these as the dominant social media networks for PR purposes: Coming in first was Twitter, at 34.4 percent, then Facebook at 29.3 percent and LinkedIn at 23.3 percent. The remaining 13.1 percent opted for Google+ (4.8 percent), blogs or other social platforms as their principal vehicles.

Typically, SMB owners and employees wear many hats. When the PR hat gets put on, time should be spent working on building those social media connections. For the PR pros from the survey, 65 percent dedicate time each week to identifying influencers in their markets and social networks. How much time ranges from 12.6 percent spending four or more hours, 30.5 percent spending two to three hours, and 23.3 percent at least one hour.

The real impact of social media can be seen in the choices being made to use the medium. The emphasis on collaboration, conversing and building the relationship is aimed toward social media, while the more nuts and bolts press releases and the “how about a story on this?” is happening in email. Understanding the best tool for the job is part of the challenge these days with so many options at our feet for communicating, marketing and promotion. Putting the best that social media can offer to work for us requires time and tending, just as all good relationships do.

The survey was conducted by Cision, a provider of software, services, and tools to the public relations and marketing industry.

Growth of Mobile, Can We Keep Up?

Stephanie Jordan — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:08:10 +0000

The recently released Mobile Content and Applications Forecasts report from Informa Telecoms and Media predicts that in 2016, mobile phone users will, on average, consume 6.5 times as much video, 8 times as much music and nearly 10 times as much games as in 2011.

According to the Informa report, the increase in data traffic will far outstrip revenue growth. Global mobile data traffic is forecast to grow tenfold from 3.89 trillion megabytes in 2011 to 39.75 trillion megabytes in 2016. However, global mobile data revenues are only forecast to double in the same period from $325.8 billion in 2011 to $627.5 billion in 2016.

Carriers are already responding to the use of higher bandwidths (my own carrier just instigated a new “smartphone” additional monthly charge at the time I upgraded my phone) to increase revenues. With the speed in which we can now operate from work, home and anywhere in between, it makes one wonder how much more productive can we be than we already are? Can a person scale to the speed and processing ability of his or her mobile phone? Or will we be completely distracted from work with all the music, games, and online fun at our disposal? This may be our biggest BYOD future challenge yet.

One thing we are already seeing signs of is an increase in attempts to monetize mobile. Whether from nefarious efforts like phishing and spam, to legitimate advertisers, the penetration and growth of mobile is attracting attention. Unlike for email, however, most people feel the phone is a very personal device and so far, have been highly resistant to any form of advertising.

Research conducted earlier this year by YouGov and commissioned by Upstream showed 79% of consumers in the UK and 72% in the U.S. say that they find advertisements on their mobiles or smartphones irritating. What’s more, “only one in six (11%) Brits and 15% of Americans who have surfed the internet on their mobile phone have ever even clicked on a mobile advert.”

Online marketers have their work cutout for them as they try to capture and ride the growing mobile wave. On the flip side, IT administrators and executive management that have monitored employees use of company-owned resources may find a whole new challenge in mobile computing and productivity.

FTC Calls Upon Companies to Adopt "Do Not Track"

Stephanie Jordan — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 03:37:05 +0000

This week the Federal Trade Commission published what some call a landmark report, which offers best practices for businesses to protect the privacy of consumers. The commission’s “Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change” (pdf) report encourages companies to give consumers greater control over the collection and use of personal data before legislation requires them to do it.

“If companies adopt our final recommendations for best practices—and many of them already have—they will be able to innovate and deliver creative new services that consumers can enjoy without sacrificing their privacy,” said Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC in a statement. “We are confident that consumers will have an easy to use and effective Do Not Track option by the end of the year because companies are moving forward expeditiously to make it happen and because lawmakers will want to enact legislation if they don’t.”

Online privacy is a huge topic of late. Last month the White House unveiled its “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights,” a set of guidelines intended to give consumers more control over their personal information.

While both of these efforts are considered “guidelines” and “best practices”, most believe that ultimately legislation will be forthcoming. At the time of the Administration’s February announcement, Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) President Leslie Harris said: “We believe legislation will likely be necessary to achieve these protections, we support the White Paper’s call for the development of consensus rules on emerging privacy issues to be worked out by industry, civil society, and regulators.”

Even while the FTC is encouraging companies to adopt voluntarily, at the same time it is recommending legislation this week stating in the report that Congress should consider enacting general privacy legislation, data security and breach notification legislation, and data broker legislation.

Upon the reports release, CDT Director of Consumer Privacy Justin Brookman commented: “The FTC has delivered an important reminder that Do Not Track standards must address the collection of behavioral data as well as its use. Moreover, the FTC rightfully refocuses attention on the heightened privacy concerns presented when ISPs, operating systems, and browsers have broad access to consumers’ online activities.”

According to the FTC report, focus areas of consumer privacy protections include five main action items:

Do-Not-Track—The Commission commends the progress made in this area: browser vendors have developed tools to allow consumers to limit data collection about them, the Digital Advertising Alliance has developed its own icon-based system and also committed to honor the browser tools, and the World Wide Web Consortium standards-setting body is developing standards. “The Commission will work with these groups to complete implementation of an easy-to-use, persistent, and effective Do Not Track system,” the report says.

Mobile—The FTC urges companies offering mobile services to work toward improved privacy protections, including disclosures. To that end, it will host a workshop on May 30, 2012 to address how mobile privacy disclosures can be short, effective, and accessible to consumers on small screens.

Data Brokers—The Commission calls on data brokers to make their operations more transparent by creating a centralized website to identify themselves, and to disclose how they collect and use consumer data. In addition, the website should detail the choices that data brokers provide consumers about their own information.

Large Platform Providers—The report cited heightened privacy concerns about the extent to which platforms, such as Internet Service Providers, operating systems, browsers and social media companies, seek to comprehensively track consumers’ online activities. The FTC will host a public workshop in the second half of 2012 to explore issues related to comprehensive tracking.

Promoting Enforceable Self-Regulatory Codes—The FTC will work with the Department of Commerce and stakeholders to develop industry-specific codes of conduct. To the extent that strong privacy codes are developed, when companies adhere to these codes, the FTC will take that into account in its law enforcement efforts. If companies do not honor the codes they sign up for, they could be subject to FTC enforcement actions.

While some organizations have been open to adopting the suggested practices, the FTC feels that many companies need to adopt its privacy framework now, before anticipated legislation makes it a requirement.

Just Whose Twitter Account Is It Anyway? Social Media Policy and the Enterprise

Steve Maxey — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:12:10 +0000

In late December, a story exploded on Twitter concerning the court battle between Noah Kravitz and the site Phonedog over ownership of the followers for the @ Phonedog_Noah Twitter account. The facts everyone agrees on are that Noah was an editor for Phonedog starting in April 2006, that the @ Phonedog_Noah account was set up after that, and that when he left PhoneDog in October 2010 he took the Twitter account with him, renaming it @ NoahKravitz.

After that, everything else gets murky: Did Noah initiate the Twitter account, or was he instructed to start it by Phonedog, using a naming convention they devised? Was there an agreement that Kravitz would occasionally tweet about the company after his departure, as he told The New York Times? And why did Phonedog wait eight months before deciding to sue Kravitz, claiming that the 17,000 Twitter followers he had when he left constituted a “customer list” that they valued at $2.50 per name per month.

When the courts unravel this, it could have broad impact on how Twitter is used in the Enterprise, not applying to just this situation, where a hybrid @ Company_User name was used for the account, but also to corporate liability for the contents of branded accounts and to employees who Tweet about their business lives exclusively under their own names.

Easy Answers Are Not Always Good Answers

The easy answer for enterprises is to draw a sharp line. Prohibit employees from tweeting about work under their own names and exclusively use a brand name as the Twitter account name. This would avoid any disputes over what was most responsible for building the size of a Twitter account’s following—the personality of and content generated by the Twitterer or the efforts and expense the company put into promoting the account. It would also make ownership of the account clearer: If it is named solely for the company or brand, the company owns it.

However, even within the social media world, Twitter is in some ways unique. Facebook and now even Google+ have separate kinds of pages for businesses vs. individuals. On Facebook you “Friend” an individual and “Like” a business or organization. On Twitter, an account is an account: The quality of a Twitter the content tweeted and the personality that comes through define the account and are responsible for how fast that number of followers grows. Restricting all of the organization’s Twitter output to generic corporate communications and links only to well-vetted pages can stifle the Twitter account’s growth by taking the “social” out of social media. Despite the increasing corporate use of Twitter, great utility for many organizations and some quite successful corporate and branded accounts, the biggest followerships still are for individuals or organizations that project strong personalities. For example, @ OReillyMedia has a substantial 39,000 plus followers, and O’Reilly’s @ Radar Twitter feed for its joint blog on emerging technologies has almost 21,000 followers, but O”Reilly founder and president @ TimOreilly has over 1.5 million followers.

In the fall of 2011, at least one big tech publisher transitioned Twitter accounts named for the editors of some of their smaller brands to the name of the publication they edited. Since then, Twitter accounts that once offered observation and analysis and links to relevant articles elsewhere are now essentially an RSS feed for the publication going out by the Twitter channel, and the number of Twitter followers has stagnated.

Besides limiting the success of social media efforts, too restrictive a policy could also inhibit recruitment of talented social media consultants. Too open a policy could lead to inconsistent messaging and to accounts built up through corporate resources leaving the company and going to a competitor.

Two things are clear:

The time to establish account ownership is when the account is being set up.
Every company has to have a clear, written social media policy—and they have to review and revise it at least once a year to make sure it is neither opening the company up to losing valuable prospects when an employee leaves nor strangling nascent social media efforts and stifling recruitment of social media talent.

In Today’s API World, IT Needs to Assume A Breach and Marketers Need to Be Security Conscious

Stephanie Jordan — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:03:43 +0000

When Message Systems’ Mike Hillyer (director of solution engineering) and Dave Lewis (CMO) set out to write the recently published white paper Safeguarding Message Streams for Enterprises and Email Service Providers -Technology Principles for Architecting a Secure Messaging Environment the authors quickly realized that they could not write about inbound message streams without talking about outbound message streams, they could not write about marketing without talking about security, they could not write about Email Service Providers (ESPs) without talking about enterprises. Messaging today is now about relationships and interrelationships between messaging channels, between online marketing and security, between siloed business units and consistency, between data stewardship and trust, between stealth attacks and breaches, and on and on. It can be difficult to talk about messaging because of the “if we address this, then we should also address that” aspect that the medium has become.

The number of channels that constitutes messaging is more than making an impact; it is changing the game. As Lewis points out for enterprises many business units make their own decisions about messaging deployments. Some might have an in house arrangement, another might outsource. Even within the same business unit email might be handled one way, SMS, or IM another. In the white paper, Lewis and Hillyer talk about how this typical enterprise treatment of messaging channels operating in silos is opening up more points of vulnerability than ever before.

Others in the industry agree that companies are more at risk today due to the number of channels organizations use for messaging. “Companies are clearly at greater risk now and this will only increase as messaging moves more and more away from what we think of as conventional email to new methods and techniques,” states Michael O’Reirdan, chairman of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). “A few years ago when you thought of messaging, email was the first thing that came to mind - and with it the problem of spam. But now, think of messaging and a plethora of techniques come to mind that are all suddenly available to the bad guys. Email is still there, and is a very effective tool for slipping a compromised file onto an unsuspecting CFO’s desktop, but what about a Facebook message from an old friend or a link in a Tweet that looks like it might be fun to follow up? Then there is the whole issue of the mobile ecosystem and how smart phones can be used to compromise a target’s personal data.”

This interplay between messaging channels, as I noted above, and the number of ways to deploy (and protect) them has really changed messaging radically in the last few years. MAAWG, an open, global organization with high-profile members from the messaging industry, has long been on the forefront of messaging abuse since the days when spam was at its height. O’Reirdan shared with me that during MAAWG’s recent meeting the group decided to rename itself to better reflect the breath of what has become the organization’s charter.

“MAAWG is evolving from just being the “spam” organization into focusing on handling new methods of abuse in the messaging arena, including continuing to work on mobile,” explains O’Reirdan. “At the same time, the malware, once executed, that sets up botnets is still at the core of abuse and MAAWG will persist in its work to help ISPs eliminate this. Hence the new view we have of MAAWG is M3 (cubed), M3AAWG, representing the three areas of concern, Messaging, Mobile and Malware.” The official announcement of the name change is expected in the coming months.

The number of vulnerability points that Lewis notes as a growing concern for organizations is largely due to the newer threat landscape of APTs (advanced persistent threats) that are more targeted and more stealth in execution than before. In the white paper, a definition of APTs is given from the analyst group Garner: “’Advanced’ means it gets through your existing defenses. ‘Persistent’ means it succeeds in hiding from your existing level of detection. ‘Threat’ means it causes you harm.” This sophistication has led Lewis to caution organizations to think about shifting to a posture beyond frontline defense and assume that infiltration from cybercriminals has either already occurred or will occur.

“The number of breaches that we publicly read about in the press, is not representative of the number of breaches that are actually happening,” says Lewis. “This is for two reasons. One is that the breaches have not been reported because there are no reporting requirements standards – often companies may decide what constitutes a breach. For different reasons they choose not to disclose a breach, as there are consequences to doing that, so if they can avoid it, they do. It’s human nature. The other is that they might simply not recognize the breach. They might not know that it actually occurred.”

Fail-proof messaging security cannot be counted on in today’s messaging world believes Lewis. “My point about the inevitability of a breach, when you look at the issue of all the various points of vulnerability that a hacker can find to get into your system, including simply human neglect – a memory stick fallen into the wrong hands, or even more intentional than that – the point is these threats are so persistent that sooner or later, something is going to get through your defenses. So you need to be prepared for that inevitability and it is not just a matter of having an incident response plan waiting in the wings and to be ready to move on it, at that point, it is already too late. If you are calling up your clients and issue a press release and so forth – you are in damage control mode.

Instead, Lewis encourages organizations to focus on mitigation. “What we mean by mitigation is not just damage control, but an extension of your prevention processes. You need to continue to monitor for abusive activity in your mail streams both incoming and outbound as an ongoing thing and be prepared to act on it.”

On outbound messaging for example, Lewis says companies typically use complaint data, ISP block and bounce data to measure deliverability. “That is all well and good, and an appropriate use to see if a campaign is successful or not, but how about applying that data in your security program?” he asks. “If you have a huge spike in complaints or you suddenly find yourself blocked, or are getting bounces – it could mean you have done something wrong, like send content to the wrong audience, but it could also mean that your system has been compromised and you don’t know about it. The trick is to be able to capture that data and act on it in real time so that you don’t turn a data breach into a data disaster.”

Staying vigilant is a re-occurring theme when dealing with today’s messaging threats. Lewis cautions online marketer’s to think more security-minded in today’s messaging world. “Marketing people in most organizations don’t think in terms of security. It is an afterthought, if they think of it at all,” he observes. “Marketers need to recognize the criticality of security, not in some abstract way, but in terms of them achieving their own goals. Marketers are typically tasked with generating revenue and building relationships. Both of those goals could be in jeopardy if there is a loss of trust. For example, the way most marketers think about authentication is as a tactic to improve deliverability, but that is not really its intended purpose. They need to be thinking about authentication on not just their outbound, but also on their inbound. They need to take a page from the ISP carrier book and apply it to their own organizations.”

The increase of spear phishing incidents is another example of how advanced threats have become. Lewis feels that marketers should not under value their marketing data. “Companies often say, it is only an email address, or only marketing data with the notion that it does not have the same value as PII (personally identifiable information), but if you can use that data to target an individual and get them to open an email, then a phisher can do that too. We have to think in terms of how they are using the data. It is really a mistake to underestimate them.”

Phishers are really incredible marketers. Anyone can become a victim and technology is often fooled too. O’Reirdan recommends to everyone: “Think before you act, look before you leap, don’t be gullible. All obvious, I know,” he says. “But what works well in the real world, works well online too. Spear phishing almost always relies on social engineering so no amount of software will protect against a good and ingenious exploit of the ‘human in the loop’.”

Messaging security is never done, according to Lewis. “I think the biggest mistake companies can make at this juncture is to make a few tweaks in their technology, to make a few practice changes and call it done. The most dangerous thing organizations can do is to underestimate spear phishers. They may not have any scruples, but they understand the value of data. I see this as a significant threat to the ecosystem. This isn’t a short-term thing. We need to figure out how to maintain a safe and secure environment because this is crucial to our ability to obtain data and use data for messaging. This is the way it will be from here on in.”

The Online Trust Alliance, as part of its Security by Design campaign, created a very useful self-survey (in the form of 20 questions) for organizations to use to help become better prepared to respond to and avoid security incidents. Questions like: Is your definition of personal information current and in line with both applicable industry regulation and customer’s expectations? Have you conducted a comprehensive audit of your data flows across the enterprise and vendors including a privacy and security review of all data collection and management activities? Are employees equipped to notify management of security incidents, including intrusion, breach, data misuse or data loss? What processes do you have in place for data minimization, secure archiving and data destruction? Take a look at all Top 20 Questions as steps toward what Lewis terms “proactive mitigation”.

Above all else, stay vigilant and ready, especially toward social engineering tactics. As O’Reirdan states, “Social engineering remains a major threat and a route by which many APTs begin to weave their insidious webs within organizations. In many cases, APTs are long term operations that get embedded within the enterprise so that when exfiltration of data commences, they are so below the radar that detection is very hard.”

Some Thoughts on Short Attention Spans

Michael Osterman — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 22:37:27 +0000

In yesterday’s mail I received two unusual pieces of correspondence: The first, a handwritten note from a collaboration expert—and a very nice man—that does some industry analysis for us as part of our annual information service; and the second, a letter inviting me to attend some 15-minute Webinars. Both were unusual in that they were written on paper and sent through the mail, not electronically.

That got me to thinking about how our communications has changed from mailed correspondence to fax to email to SMS and other very short modes of communication. While the speed of delivery is certainly improving over time, I believe the primary driver for migrating to faster and shorter modes of communication is television. For example, studies have shown that an increase in television viewing among children shortens their attention span, which I believe translates into other realms, as well. For example, the average sound bite in the 1968 presidential election was 43 seconds, but dropped to 9.8 seconds in the 1988 election and 7.3 seconds by 2000. Moreover, television changes our mindset into believing that every problem on a funny TV show can be solved in 30 minutes, while problems on serious shows require a full 60 minutes (minus 16 minutes of commercials) to resolve.

If our attention spans continue to get shorter, what impact will this have on our ability to communicate meaningfully in the future? Can you say enough about your product in 10 seconds to get people interested in what you’re selling? Can your 140-character Tweet or 160-character text message really convey your actual meaning? More important, can you as a business decision maker or voter or parent or consumer gather enough information in just a few seconds to make a well-informed and meaningful decision?

I’m not sure what the solution might be and welcome your thoughts on the topic, particularly in the context of business communications and how we will convey information in the future. I think it’s an important topic to discuss.

Email Accountability: A Vision Worth Pursuing?

Stephanie Jordan — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 08:21:01 +0000

Plain talk about our commitment to safe and secure messaging in email

The virtually free and anonymous nature of email has frustrated its use by legitimate marketers since the earliest days of the medium. From the point where email achieved critical mass (sufficient adoption for reach and revenue), the bad guys have been exploiting the enormous potential of email as well as its weaknesses for their greater profit, or elicit gain. Spam, spoofing and a host of other negligent, abusive and criminal behaviors all come from the lure of lots of money made at very low cost and with little risk of being stopped or caught; it’s a compelling value proposition for the bad guys, and one that we must change to preserve the integrity of email.

Of course, the ISPs have been waging war on the bad guys for many years now. And it’s been their efforts to shield customers from schemes perpetrated by the bad guys that’s led to the challenges with email deliverability for the good guys. Yet more critical than the collateral damage done to the good guys is a key question: can the war be won without fundamentally altering the bad guys’ value proposition? I’d suggest not, and to date, the key enablers of their business model—low cost and anonymity—remain intact, and so their motivation to make a lot of money still holds sway. Not surprising then, the war continues to rage in a point/counterpoint game of escalating technical sophistication and imagination.

In this article, I connect the two issues—cost and anonymity—and discuss them in the context of an industry-wide solution for Email Accountability that establishes identity, imposes cost and improves the email ecosystem for the benefit of all stakeholders, including you as an email marketer. Or rather, I want to talk about our collective commitment to an industry solution that’s been hanging around incomplete for over seven years—50 years in dog time, an eternity in Internet time.

The Price of Anonymity

There’s no question that ‘free’ incents (or at least enables) behaviors in email that wouldn’t be feasible in another, more costly medium (direct mail, for example). Cost can definitely function as a constraint even when a marketer’s actions aren’t constrained by his own conscience or respect for the customer. I guess ‘spammer’ is the right term for such a marketer in email, if not called worse.

The lack of identity in email feeds this behavioral problem in a major way—it allows the bad guys to get away with their misbehaviors. And the same thing holds when you graduate from spam to more malicious schemes where the intent is truly criminal. Regardless of the degree of ‘badness,’ anonymity is the bad guy’s shield from being held accountable. And ‘getting away with it’ is a potent motivator when coupled with the big bucks to be made.

What does allowing the bad guys to ‘get away with it’ mean to you?

As a legitimate email marketer, it means your bottom line takes a hit whenever your email gets caught up in the ongoing battle between the ISPs and bad guys. It means you sometimes can’t get relevant email delivered to your own customers or properly targeted prospects. It means you suffer a potentially huge brand and opportunity loss. That’s true, even if you put aside all the frustrations and headaches, diversions of time and technical resources that go into managing deliverability and recovering from the occasional train wrecks.

Yes, you, email marketer, bear a heavy cost for us allowing anonymity to shield the bad guys from accountability. And I’d suggest that your only recourse is to fight anonymity with clear, persistent and unambiguous identity. Proper identity credentials are what enable you to differentiate yourself from the bad guys, assert that you’re a reputable sender (good guy) and for the ISPs to accept those assertions. Without such credentials, how do the ISPs know that you are whom you say and not just someone spoofing you?

If this is all true, why haven’t brands universally adopted email identity standards? And for that matter, why aren’t ISPs universally checking email identity credentials and acting on what they check? Because what good does it do if you fully and properly disclose your identity when the ISPs don’t bother to check or act?

You First. No, After You.

The answers to these questions come down to one thing—adoption. Brands don’t adopt identity standards because they don’t see the risks and rewards of doing so, partly because the ISPs don’t strictly enforce them. And ISPs don’t strictly enforce the standards because adoption by brands hasn’t reached critical mass.

Am I overdrawing this chicken/egg situation a bit? Yes, but it’s pretty much where things are at—and where they’ve been for some time now. Despite the best efforts of the Online Trust Alliance (OTA), Email Sender & Provider Coalition (ESPC), Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and other industry groups to push the email authentication agenda, we’re stalled in implementing this critical component to our vision for Email Accountability. So maybe it’s time to revisit that vision and ask ourselves: “Do we have it right?”

When I speak of Identity, my frame of reference is what was envisioned in Project Lumos years ago as the conceptual blueprint for Email Accountability. [PDF] It was the genesis, at least in part, for the authentication protocols and reputation systems that subsequently emerged.

In Lumos, Identity and Accountability were seen as interlocking principles, but it was recognized that Identity had to come first for a simple reason: you can’t hold people accountable for their actions if you don’t know who they are. But Lumos postulated that if you could identify the good guys, it would then be possible to isolate the bad, hold them accountable and impose a ‘cost’ that would destroy their business model. (The ‘cost’ would take the form of denied access (blocks) that would depress response to a point where spamming was no longer financially viable.) While email is very low cost, it’s not accurate to say it’s actually free—even for a spammer. But therein lies the rub. Since spamming can be highly profitable at incredibly low response rates, it takes broad adoption and strict enforcement of the authentication protocols to impact a spammer’s business model and for the benefits of an improved email ecosystem to materialize.

I’ve always felt this vision for Email Accountability was a pretty nifty one for choking off spam. But of course, our environment has changed since Lumos was proposed—it’s become much more dangerous. Now we have extremely targeted elicit schemes to deal with, such as phishing and spear phishing. Yet, the monetary motivation is the same and today’s bad guys are enabled by the same email weaknesses—anonymity and cost. For phishers, anonymity is achieved by masquerading as legitimate brands, and it’s that identify spoofing that makes company employees and customers alike vulnerable to exploitation. And all that’s made possible because senders aren’t authenticating their email, receivers aren’t checking or both. So by the time a phishing scheme is discovered, it’s usually too late. The assets have been stolen and the perpetrator has moved on, often using those assets in new, more dangerous exploits. The cost is low because phishing schemes are inexpensive to launch and the risk of being caught is low too.

And this brings us back to the problem at hand—achieving the levels of adoption and enforcement required to make authentication work. How many years have we been discussing this topic? Yet, as the OTA notes in its May report, while 56% of sampled entities apply SPF and/or DKIM, “the volume of authenticated mail sent from these domains is estimated to be significantly lower due to inconsistent adoption across all domains, sub-domains and mailstreams” thereby limiting the value of authentication in brand and consumer protection. The OTA report also confirms that ISP enforcement remains limited at best.

Authentication: Its Time Has Come

I believe that it’s well past time for our industry—senders and receivers alike—to implement email authentication as the first step toward true accountability. And implementation means full and consistent compliance by senders, and, most importantly, more than ‘wink and nod’ enforcement by receivers. Enforcement must mean that receivers routinely check and block senders who don’t comply with the authentication protocols, whether their reputations warrant acceptance of their mail or not. Period. No exceptions.

I know this may seem like an extreme position for a marketer to take, but I have three good reasons for it.

First, all players in our ecosystem have a big stake in winning this war against the bad guys. But to win the war, they must first join the war—and I’m speaking here to my marketing colleagues at enterprises and service providers. Up to now, their primary motivation in supporting authentication has been the deliverability of their own email. However, recent breaches should convince them that they have much more at stake than mere collateral damage. The war has shifted, expanded. The customers, employees and assets of enterprises and services providers are now being targeted too—and more often than not, email is the vehicle of access and exploitation with cost and anonymity being the key drivers.

What does this mean? Just in case you missed the inference in my use of the generic term ‘receiver,’ let me be clear: enforcement isn’t an issue for just ISPs anymore. With all the exploits being directed at enterprises and service providers, everyone needs to be both authenticating their outbound email and blocking email that fails their inbound checks. The stakes are too high not to do so. Authentication is not only central to safeguarding our individual companies, but also to the integrity of our ecosystem—the way we interact with each other and conduct business together. And all stakeholders have a highly vested interest in protecting that. Senders and receivers must close ranks, aggressively pursue the bad players together, and give them no quarter by stripping them of their anonymity and imposing the ultimate cost on their operations—put them out of business.

Admittedly, email authentication won’t solve all the data and network security problems plaguing our industry at the moment. There’s much more that will need to be done. Nonetheless, authentication is an essential plank in a broader security platform that will solve these problems. Because by establishing identity and imposing a cost, we can shut down the use of email as a transport agent for unwanted messages and those that might carry malicious code targeting companies and their customers. And that’s certainly essential to maintaining consumer trust and confidence in the integrity of email for safe communication and commerce.

And this leads to the second reason for my position. It relates to the great promise of Email Accountability—an improved ecosystem. It’s a promise that’s as compelling today as it was years ago when Lumos was first proposed, namely an ecosystem that would enhance the experience for customers and ensure the reliable delivery of email for the legitimate marketers who’ve long suffered collateral damage in the ongoing fight and are now incurring direct financial and brand damage. To me that promise is worth the pursuit.

My third and final reason stems from concern for the future of digital communication beyond email. If the history of direct marketing teaches us anything, it’s that the bad guys are opportunists. They follow the media adoption curve—junk mail, phone scams, email abuse—because that’s where the money is. It’s easy to see what’s next. What form will abuse take in an increasingly mobile, multi-channel digital messaging environment? That’s a scary thought. But scarier still is what our inability to solve today’s problem in email says about our readiness to tackle this greater challenge.

So why don’t we get on with it? Let’s get serious about achieving our vision of Email Accountability. There’s no better time than now since ‘safe and secure’ messaging is very much part of the whole data security debate. And no better place than the upcoming OTA Forum to join with others of like mind.

Either that, or let’s admit our vision for Email Accountability is unachievable or fatally flawed, and rethink what our vision should be. We’ve lived in limbo land long enough. This can’t be our permanent residence.

Marketers: Repair Poor Reputations to Reach Inbox

Stephanie Jordan — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 02:41:03 +0000

A new report re-confirms that email reputation significantly impacts a marketer’s ability to reach their intended audience. The results of the report, published by Return Path, encourages email marketers to examine the critical factors impacting email marketing performance in order to ensure their emails are getting into the inbox. While the report targets large email marketers, the findings can be applied to anyone who is responsible for their company’s emailing programs to customers and clients, regardless of size.

“If you have a million addresses and 20% of your emails are blocked, you are missing 200,000 messages every time you hit ‘send,’” reminds George Bilbrey, president of Return Path. “This means lost revenue, poor customer experience, increased customer service costs, lost branding opportunities and the inability to advance your message to your marketplace. By understanding the impact email reputation has on email programs, marketers can take immediate and corrective action to ensure higher inbox placement rates.”

Return Path says there are three critical factors that ISPs and other large-volume mail receivers use to determine whether or not to block emails:

Reputation of a given email server, measured by complaints, spam trap hits, unknown user rates and similar metrics.

Infrastructure set up which indicates a sender is a “real” mail server and not a botnet or spammer.

Content associated with complaints, spam trap hits and unknown user rates.

To prepare the report, the researchers relied on complaint rates, spam trap hits and unknown user rates by Sender Score, the company’s proprietary reputation rank, which is calculated by aggregating reputation performance data from a variety of ISPs, spam filtering and security companies. For its reputation study, Return Path says analysts examined IPs by Sender Score bands on more than 18 million IP addresses, collected from 30 of the world’s top ISPs and other large-volume mail receivers representing over 2.1 billion mailboxes in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. The study shows how reputation factors influence an IP’s Sender Score and how that correlates to Inbox Placement Rates (IPR).

Report Findings
Return Path’s research shows that IPs with Sender Scores of between 41-50 have an IPR of 64% which means 36% of their email is blocked or diverted to a junk folder. IPs with Sender Scores in the mid-range between 51-70 already show considerably higher average IPRs with 71% (Sender Score 51-60) and 76% (Sender Score 61-70) respectively. Notably there is a decline in email that is rejected right at the gateway, however, the study shows IPs within this Sender Score band have a high number of emails that are rejected at a point beyond the gateway. Only IPs with the highest Sender Scores have email that is routinely “accepted” into an ISP’s system. The average IPR for IPs with Sender Scores of 91 or greater is about 88%. This is significantly lower than the 99% “accepted” rate that many Email Service Providers (ESPs) claim, Return Path points out, because in their view ESPs measure “delivered” and “accepted” at the ISP gateway, rather than what makes it to the inbox.

The Return Path research report, “The Sender Reputation Report: Key Factors that Impact Email Deliverability” is available for download.

Social Media Madness - Does Everyone Need It?

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Tue, 31 May 2011 03:43:36 +0000

In our constant quest for “faster, better, newer,” we have invented, embraced, and quickly discarded social media mechanisms at a blistering rate. In a few short years we went from simplistic Friendster, to the “all me all the time” model of MySpace, to the Twitter temple of the content averse. Our personal selves (Facebook), are now entwined with our professional selves (LinkedIn), and wherever we are (FourSquare), and whatever we do (Twitter), is out there instantly via instant SMS updates.

Business saw the “social” in “social media” as an untapped avenue for advertising, selling and recruiting, and used it accordingly. A number of companies rewarded people for recommending product or services to their circle of friends, by offering account credits or some form of discount. The viral nature of “recommendations” was a perfect opportunity to convert site visits to sales. The most successful vendors seem to actually embody the “social” nature of the medium – Groupon, Living Social, Plum District – by encouraging groups to get together and do things at reduced rates. Other successful vendors have utilized behavioral based tracking to tailor their offerings to a specific demographic – teens, career-oriented individuals, or singles. Yet for all the social media success stories there are an even larger amount of failures.

“It’s amazing the way the market has put an emphasis on just one communication vehicle as if it was the big solution to everything,” says Susan Maxwell Stevens, Conversation Strategist. “It’s still about the mix of messages and communication vehicles, regardless of who or what you are promoting,”

As with many things in this world, just because something exists doesn’t mean that we need to use, buy or own it. There are many cases in which businesses just don’t have a compelling reason to have a Facebook presence or a Twitter account. In fact, there are many businesses that probably shouldn’t use certain social media outlets in a bid to win new customers – gastroenterology practitioners and crematoriums come to mind. Yet because social media mechanisms exist, and seemingly everyone is using some form of it, no one wants to be left behind.

“If these things were not free, people would do a cost benefit analysis,” says Brian Kennedy, Capital Markets Communications Consultant in NYC. “I have wondered if an even shorter version of Twitter - say only 40 characters - became popular, would people rush to populate that site as well?”

Jon Stephenson, Senior Account Executive and External Communications Consultant in Washington D.C., feels that it begins by monitoring the existing conversations and going where the best benefit can be had, “Just telling someone that they shouldn’t have a presence at all on Facebook is going to be a hard sell; telling them what they should expect from their presence on Facebook is a whole different issue. Managing client expectations with social media is always a critical facet of the engagement.”

Just Because You Build It Doesn’t Mean They’ll Come

Every business looking to capitalize on social media madness should examine what they have to offer and what they stand to gain before funneling their marketing dollars into social media programs. They should then carefully consider which channel is best for what they are “selling” and whom they are trying to reach. Companies should also consider the amount of time and energy they have to maintain their social media outreach. A large part of the business-to-public exchange is in the volume, frequency and relevancy of the messages. Twitter is likely a bad place to set up shop if you aren’t prepared to engage daily.

“In reality, who is going to tweet frequently about document management? Such tweets would have to be “planted” tweets — advertising that mimics real informational content. I suppose a company could mandate each employee tweet once about how wonderful the company is. I suppose in the SEO world that works; although the company would have no real control over the quality of the tweets,” muses Christine Rook, an IT Recruiter in Dallas.

Mark Palony, Digital Strategist at Russell Herder, believes that social media is extremely relevant for B2B companies and has used it successfully for several years to achieve both marketing and PR goals for clients, but cautions against a one-size-fits-all mentality, “As it is for all communications channels, it is important to choose the correct vehicle for distributing your message. Vehicles like blogs, podcasts and Twitter have helped numerous B2B companies increase awareness and market share.”

Maxwell Stevens tells the story of a retailer she was working with struggling to start and maintain a Twitter account. Several of the retailer’s customers had been telling him that he should be tweeting some of his pithy thoughts relating to his market. Maxwell Stevens told him that he should only invest the time if it made sense with his larger marketing plan, and the retailer was relieved to hear someone knowledgeable say that he might not have to add something more to his to do list. When she explained to the retailer that he could link his existing Facebook page (something he was already using successfully), with the Twitter account so it would auto-update, he was thrilled. Sometimes it’s not about taking every available avenue individually, but finding their intersections and going the route that garners the best, and least time consuming, results.

Many communications experts believe that part of the problem organizations have in successfully utilizing social media is that they believe it is a separate entity instead of seeing it for the tool that it is – another means of expanding their existing communications and marketing efforts.

“I get the impression that part of the problem comes from looking at social media in isolation, as evidenced by references to ‘social media campaigns’,” explains Daniel McGrath, Communications Manager, CIS & South East Europe at DHL Express Russia, “A big part of PR, for me (a relative newbie in the field) is about creating a narrative around what your company does, which is appealing for a particular target audience and supports the positioning of your brand or products, then using a mosaic of different media to get the narrative/s out to that audience.”

Few argue that a business should avoid social media altogether, but it is entirely possible to build successful PR campaigns without it. McGrath feels that social media is just one possible channel – albeit one with great potential - and whether you’re a B2B organization or not, the degree to which you use it should depend on your audience and what you’re trying to achieve.

Finding the right practitioner to assist an organization in conceiving, executing on and managing their social media goals can be critical to the company’s ultimate success in that area. Many public relations and communications firms now offer “social media experts” and programs as part of their service menu. Ensuring that both the practitioner and the client have the same understanding of “social media outreach” and putting success metrics in place, will help to ensure that good money isn’t thrown after bad to maintain something that doesn’t meet business needs.

Adds Mustafa Stephan Dill, Principal of Ummah Relations, “I’m a firm believer in “just because you can, doesn’t mean you always should.” When prospective clients want a Facebook or Twitter account, I always ask them, “why?” If they can’t articulate it - and they usually can’t beyond ‘well everyone else is doing it’ - then we’ll drill down to identify a specific goal. Social media for me is about user behavior as they seek solutions; if you can offer a content-based solution, then great. If not, wait until you can and in the meantime, keep analyzing customers’ behavior until a solution presents itself.”

Lori Donovan, a contributing member of LinkedIn’s 36,000+ member group, “Communications and Public Relations Professionals,” sums it up by saying, “I think it’s all part of knowing your audience. If you audience isn’t on Facebook , you don’t need to be there.”

IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers Survey Finds Online Advertising Hits All Time High

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Fri, 27 May 2011 06:37:11 +0000

According to a new study done by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), online advertising hit a new high of $7.3 billion in Q1 2011 – an increase over Q1 2010 and the highest Q1 revenue level ever. This follows last year’s record-breaking first half, in which advertisers spent $12.1 billion. Annual 2010 revenue reached $26.04 billion, a 15 percent increase from 2009, also a new high.

The below IAB data highlights quarterly ad revenue growth in billions since 1999:

Search advertising made up the lion’s share of online ad revenues in 2009 at 46%. In 2010, search accounted for 45% of revenues. The IAB has not yet released data for 2011 but using the past 2 years’ data as a guide, it is likely still the leader in online ad revenue generators.

Email Deliverability Challenges Addressed With Solution to Avoid Spam Complaints and Hard Bounces

Stephanie Jordan — Thu, 19 May 2011 05:49:23 +0000

This week Message Systems announced enhancements to its Adaptive Delivery application. Originally launched in 2009, Adaptive Delivery helps companies optimize online marketing campaigns by automatically monitoring and tuning delivery parameters in real time.

“Despite best practices and top-tier infrastructure, our deliverability rates were often less-than-stellar,” says customer James Thompson, email systems manager at Infusionsoft. “Now with Adaptive Delivery, we’re steadily above 99 percent. We’ll always need to have a deliverability specialist on hand, but now we’re able to focus on other projects.”

According to Message Systems, Adaptive Delivery can capture, interpret and act on data, sending alerts when a mailing encounters a block, high bounce rates or other issues, and summarizes actions that can be readily reviewed and initiated to resolve problems.

A distinguishing feature of Adaptive Delivery is how email systems managers can segregate and manage mail streams by different types of email or sender, customer segment, domain or other criteria. This makes it possible to segment higher-risk mail streams from lower-risk ones, making it easier for ISPs on the receiving end to determine and assign each mail stream’s unique reputation.

The enhancement announcement is the added availability of Smart Threshold Management, which allows companies to suspend mailings or throttle down traffic based on different threshold rules, and those rules are configurable to their specific requirements.

“It has helped us streamline email operations and improve our reputation,” acknowledges Thompson of the solution. “It has also helped us increase throughput and keep up with our team’s aggressive sales goals.”